Saturday, 28 February 2004

"The epistle to the Hebrews, Douglas Coupland, "Walk On" and contemporary culture's pervasive sense of "homelessness"? Oh heck yes. That'll preach! In fact, it did last week [@ Cityside in Auckland). I think those seven characteristics of "home" are great [here]. Hard to know what it is if you've never had one...

I also just want to note this phrase from Prodigal Kiwi's writeup, because amongst all the misunderstandings of focus ("But is U2 Christian?" "Who says Bono meant that lyric as a Bible reference?" "Are you bringing rock 'n' roll into church to reach the youth?"), he states exactly the approach Get Up Off Your Kneestakes: "how U2 lyrics help us hear scripture and gospel in the midst of our contemporary context."..."

I wish we’d heard more hopeful stories in our conversations with each other last weekend. Bud’s is one of those stories, told in part to us by Brian Walsh. Bud’s embodied gospel resistance, poetry and prophecy is a story of hope. A signal beacon. Bud Osborn is who Brian has dedicated Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire too. Brian used a section of Bud’s poetry – only a section, but it was powerful. I heard echoes of the very best of the “beat poets” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti / Alan Ginsberg etc…). Poets of protest and resistance. Thoughts of the 60’s, a time social, religious (etc) ferment and protest. Thought of UK Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah too. I thought of Saul Williams too (introduced to me by Stephen Garner). Listen to tracks 2 and 3. I thought of Brian’s Colossian Targums set to rap as he read them!

It seems to me that in lots of rich ways the gospel is a medium of resistance; a resisting of what diminishes life (…and that abundantly), a resisting of what dehumanizes. Jesus’ was both a life of affirmation, a life lived, and a life of resistance and subversion at both a spiritual, physical and symbolic level. Was Jesus a prophetic poet of resistance? Seems like something church should be about too, if it takes the Jesus-story seriously as “good news.” Isn't the great subversion and act of resistance, LOVE?

I’m looking to get his latest CD and book… I need poets of resistance like Bud Osborne at the core of my living. Thanks Brian for introducing me

“…Poet, rocker and champion of the homeless, Bud Osborn offers harrowing words of drugs, poverty and abuse from Vancouver's notorious East side. It is a world he knows inside and out, calls home and feels impelled to talk about. "One of the primary aims is to humanize people who come from marginalized and impoverished circumstances. I think the socio-economic system that we live in a tremendously dehumanizing operation. I don't want them to be scapegoated and simply written off. When I quote people in my poems, which is something I like to do, it is their words that are spoken, and that is a very important principle for me. To me that gives a voice to their voice. The one principle that is most important about my writing is that I write directly from personal experiences, either my own or people I have known. That's the primary emphasis for me is a kind of faithfulness or fidelity to lived experience."

This was the last of my Brian Walsh reflections resulting from spending last weekend with Brian and others in Auckland.

Friday, 27 February 2004

Notice well that I didn’t say from “culture” in my title. I didn’t! I said “cultural loyalties,” the emphasis being on “loyalties.” Put negatively, disentangling ourselves from Jesus-following disloyalties.

George R. Hunsberger made the following statement in his wonderful chapter in The Church between Gospel and Culture, pp.289-297. It resonates well with much that Brian Walsh was saying in relation to his reading of Colossians as a text that subverts the so-called “good news” of Empire or state. This statement highlights a very real challenge, or at the very least, creative tension for a church that wants to embed kingdom mission at its heart and embody it in practice.

“…Being missionary and being a ‘sent’ community – a body of people sent on a mission [or perhaps more accurately, “are” God’s mission to the world] – is not first about the Churches outward-moving actions, whether actions to attempt to convert or actions to try and make a difference, whether actions close at hand or actions at a distance. It is first about how (emphasis, mine) the church goes about those actions and (emphasis again, mine) the character of its own life in the process. It happens when a church takes leave of cultural loyalties alien to the gospel…”

This latter issue is a very real challenge (although I’m not sure many others see it on those terms) for the church I belong to as we grapple firstly with the question of church leadership and secondly with how we are actually a church that radically, imaginatively, creatively, faithfully, prayerfully, worshipfully, and subversively lives “into” and “out of” the Jesus-story in such a way that we are God’s “good news” people for the sake of his love for all of his creation. If we don’t get this (right thinking) we stand no chance of actually working this “call” out in practice; a people who’s “sending” is an authentic outworking of Jesus’ good news embodied in its very being a local expression of the people of God.

Wednesday, 25 February 2004

“…We are shaped by an alternative worldview, one which animates our thinking, our imagining, our living in the world, in order to enable the church to live out of a particular communal ethic – see Colossians 3. It is a resurrection ethic (which is to say it is an embodied ethic – Jesus was bodily resurrected). It is an ascension ethic (there is a sovereignty to which we are to bow – Jesus is King, high and lifted up, glorified above all). It is a liberation ethic. It is a hopeful / eschatological ethic (we live in the light of how the story will ultimately end – our Creator, God dwelling with the people of God in a renewed heaven and earth, i.e. a renewed cosmos). It is a relational ethic (we live in Christ, with Christ, through Christ, and for Christ).”

In other words “it is a narrative ethic – our ethic ,the ways in which we live and relate are identified with the story of Jesus.” Our living arises and results from our indwelling the Jesus / Gospel story. We learn to live into and out of that story. The story, preceded by God’s grace, becomes our charter for living; in much the same way that torah functioned for Israel. It enabled Israel to live “into” and “out” of the graced story of God choosing for himself a particular people from among all the peoples of the world; a story graced by narrative, wisdom, prophecy, poetry, and song. The Jesus-story becomes our charter for living, so we’d better understand and inhabit well the story. “This living of the story is why, in Colossians 3, Paul talks in terms of “virtues” (morals / character),” not rules, when talking about the ways of community living. These ‘virtues’, this way of living are birthed or emerge out of this alternative, subversive, juxtaposing gospel narrative centred on Jesus.

A few challenges that I see facing a church that wants to seriously live out a “narrative ethic,” into and out of the Jesus story:

Tuesday, 24 February 2004

It was good for a small group of us to end of Saturday’s sessions with a few beers, food and conversation with each other and Brian Walsh. Brian and I got to talk a bit about U2, how we hear and interpret the lyrics, and how the lyrics help us hear scripture and gospel in the midst of our contemporary context. Good to talk about Get Up off Your Knees (previously mentioned here). Brian wished he’d bought a box of books down here to New Zealand with him – no doubt being modest, his sense what that the preface by Eugene Peterson and Beth Maynard’s chapter were alone worth the price of the book.

On Sunday morning Brian delivered the sermon @ Cityside. He used the biblical book of Hebrews, Revelation, and the U2 song “Walk On” to explore and broaden our sense of the ways in which homelessness is experienced by so many people (the novel, Up in the Air, by Walter Kirn and a section on homelessness from work by Douglas Coupland were used to capture something of how “homelessness” is experienced in contemporary culture). Church is central to “home-making” in the world. Brian concluded with seven points about homes. Tragically homes for many have extremely negative connotations, but a narrative ethic, it seems to me, grounded in the gospel provides hope. The gospel is a hope-filled narrative :

(1)Home is a place of permanence, ‘of staying put.’ There’s a sense of committed permanence.
(2)Home is not merely a house. A place becomes a home when filled with shared memories, stories, enacted relationships etc.
(3)Home is a place of rest. A place of enough. A place of contentment. Home is where you don’t have to prove anything. Where you can say, “this is enough” – in itself a radically subversive thing to say in our society where we both commodify things, people etc and consume those things. We never have enough. We always want more.

Monday, 23 February 2004

Had a great weekend in Auckland. Very important for me. The weekend was spent @ Cityside Baptist interacting primarily with Brian Walsh (previously mentioned herehere and here) but also with a very stimulating group of multi-disciplinary others including Stephen (the first time we’ve met in person).

Saturday, Brian used sections from his forthcoming book (co-written with his wife Sylvia Keesmaat), Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (to be published by IVP (USA) in October 2004) to stimulate a wide-ranging (sometimes too high-level) conversation around the social, political, ecological, economic and ecclesiological contexts out of which we seek to live an alternative story. Brian describes their book as an anti-commentary which interacts with Colossians as a text that subverts empire (Roman) and therefore as a text that has something to say to us, who also live in the shadow of political, social, economic, globalising, creation destroying machinations of “Empire” and State, principalities and powers (in the sense that Wink, Stringfellow and others develop) . It’s creatively written utilising a range of writing styles including traditional exegesis, Targum, historical fiction, dialogue, and the presence of an interlocutor. The important issues this book seems it will address, from my perspective are: help in the imagining of a more holistic, radical, 24/7 Jesus-following lifestyle, and the kinds of churches that might be possible if we were able to creatively, prayerfully, and imaginatively work this subversive text, and the biblical narrative more generally, into our churches, mission, and ministry; to imagine how it might be possible to live more alively, imaginatively, creatively, and faithfully out of this subversive narrative.

My sense is that our notions of “emerging” church / alt.worship, and discipleship are in many cases not doing justice to the radical nature of the gospel and the challenge of embodying it in our 21st century political, economic, social, ecological context. My sense is that I need more help imagining and helping articulating in sermon and essay the wonderfully hopeful and energising vision articulated in biblical books such as Colossians and Galatians. This Jesus-centred gospel is much more whole-of-life, much more an invitation to subversion than my experience and observations suggest many have realised or allowed it to be.

“…We are an alternative community rooted in an alternative story. Israel’s story summed up and subverted in Jesus. This continuous and discontinuous Jesus-story now providing and funding an alternative imagination, alternative symbols, practices, and stories to those provided by ‘empire’…” (a paraphrase of a statement I heard Brian Walsh make)

Whenever I heard Brian using this kind of expression this I kept hearing Hauerwas / Willimon’s notion of our being “resident aliens.” I didn’t get a chance to ask Brian is this was an appropriate hearing or not.

This alternative story into and out of which we live should shape gender relations (how we affirm, encourage, correct (when absolutely necessary),and value one another), marital relations, the relationships between siblings, children and parents, employer and employee; how we grace "breathing space" for others, how we "make room" for perspectives different from our own; it should shape and re-shape every dimension of our lives with Jesus as our template of a fully lived humanity; it should grace and shape how we speak to one another.

I'm going to post about this weekend, just passed, for the next few days so if it isn't likely to push your 'buttons' use the time to explore some other great blogs.

Friday, 20 February 2004

An e-mail from, and a telephone call to that wonderful friend yesterday got me thinking about the ways in which persons are hurt. We’re complex us human beings, there’s so much more to us than meets the eye, the ways in which we “image” God are profoundly rich and diverse. As REM has sung, “everybody hurts sometimes.” We hurt for a whole range of reasons. I feel to varying degrees the hurts of family and friends that I love and care about. You do too. “Take comfort in your friends. Everybody hurts”

Rowan Williams in his wonderful little book / meditation, Writing in the Dust(reflecting on the events of “September 11”), talks about “breathing spaces,” about “making room” to feel, to think, to reflect when all around us appears to be chaos of one sort or another. There’s something to be said for making room for God to be discovered afresh at those times. Rowan writes, “God always has to be rediscovered. Which means God always has to be heard or seen where there aren’t yet words for him.” I would add God has also to be found when the words we hear others speak seem wrong to us, seem hurtful, or have differing meanings given the different contexts, life experiences, and world views out of which we hear them.

A person says one thing and I hear another thing. A person says something and I don’t really hear it at all, but think I have heard it. My response to another person poses a danger-to-them to the degree that I haven’t deeply listened too and respected them “as” and “where” they are in their life journey. I’m a potential ‘health hazard’ to them if I haven’t listened to where they’ve come from and the formative experiences of life they’ve had. Mine is a plea, we need to “make room” to deeply listen, to slowly speak. We can do this by creating breathing space, by allowing the passage of time, ongoing, and loving engagement to stretch and enrich our hearing, our interaction with diversity. We need to work ‘against the cultural flow’ (e.g. I want my “rights” but that often means my taking no genuine responsibility for what I say, and how I say it, especially in a disembodied, cyber context). We need to “make room” in order to really hear the “other” and to rediscover God who also speaks, often in a small quiet voice beneath the surface of what we initially see, feel, and hear.

Thursday, 19 February 2004

The Shaping of Things to Come by Australians Mike Frost & Alan Hirsch is a “mountain peak” book, a book that stands out, for all the right reasons, from many books that are more typically offered to a general, less theologically literate readership. What do I mean by a “mountain peak” book? In reading it you are gifted a rich, panoramic view; often you “see” in wonderfully new ways, the topography and beauty of the surrounding ‘landscape’.

So what’s the view like? In this case the prominent features that draw the eye are the challenges and opportunities facing churches in an increasingly Post-Christendom West. Challenges and opportunities that have to do with: how we’ve become the shape we are, placing mission at the heart of what it means to be church, incarnational ecclesiology and the importance of context, the call for a renewed Spirituality that centres on Jesus and his historical Hebraic cultural context, and finally, the reshaping of leadership models and practice for a changed and changing context.

This is a vision-giving book, a prophetic book, an inspiring book, an “I really want to read this from cover to cover book.” It’s a book whose authors wonderfully verbalise what many of us are seeing and experiencing as we engage with the fluid contexts and changing topography within which God has placed us. Frost & Hirsch ‘name’ and describe many of our experiences while at the same time adding to the mix their own insights and experiences as well travelled theologian practitioners.

Wednesday, 18 February 2004

It's not always easy being a part of a church congregation, as I said to a friend yesterday, I often feel I'm on another planet and aren't connecting well with others (a big majority)....My breadth of reading and national / global interaction with people along the edges (and at the centres) of others expressions of church doesn't always help me "fit in" either - there's both a curse and a blessing to reading, networking, blogging etc. Being a bit of a Melancholic, a socialised introvert, and an INFP (Myers Briggs) doesn't help either. I'm reading material and engaging with people and issues that aren't really figuring within Bridges (the church I belong too). So what do I do? I often dip into Eugene Peterson's writing. He gives me perspective and earths me in the realities of church. For example:

Peterson said he entered the ministry with “great ideals” and “glamorous ideas” about what he could do with his first congregation. “I was packed full of knowledge,” he said, “but nothing I expected happened.” Peterson said he soon realized that nurturing a congregation “was slow, slow work.” He compared congregations to glaciers, saying they are slow-moving, “but once they start, you can’t stop them.”

I need to become more of a realist and learn to notice the small things...that at a glance look the same as they did two months ago, but they're not...

These comments came from Eva Stimson's summary of an address Eugene gave to Presbyterian ministers in Denver on May 23rd, 2003.

Peterson closed with a few comments on Jesus’ resurrection. In the Gospel accounts, the story is presented as “a very quiet thing,” he said, with “no glamor, no fireworks.”

“The disciples were astonished; they just stood around. They were totally unprepared for the resurrection,” he said.

The temptation for pastors is to try to “make it important,” with lilies, trumpets, sunrise services and 13-point sermons explaining what happened that first Easter Sunday.

“Resurrection is not like that,” he said. “It’s God doing his work in people, in ways we never expected.”

Peterson served nearly 40-years as Pastor with the original congregation he founded

Monday, 16 February 2004

I got another nice e-mail from Beth Maynard today...
"Brian [Walsh] has 2 sermons in the book ('Get Up Off Your Knees') - the one on Ps 44 and the other sort of a broad sweep through main themes of U2's career. They're both really fine work..." She kindly added a link to Prayer, Prophecy, and Pop Culture - The Hallelujah Mix from the U2 website. I see that Stephen Garner has drawn attention to it today too. The interview includes great comments by Brian and others.

"...Essentially, Christian ministry in any context, but certainly in a campus setting, is preoccupied with imagination. What kind of images shape people in our culture?...In a consumer-saturated culture, in which our imaginations have been taken captive by the corporate powers that be, Christian ministry seeks the liberation of our imaginations...So the question then becomes, what are the resources for such a transformed imagination? And, of course, Scripture and liturgy are central to all of this. But we are in need of other sources of imagination as well. That is where the arts come in, and specifically the art of U2"

I found the reference to imagination affirming as I talked a little about the importance of imagination on Sunday morning.

and this from Beth Maynard, I think:

"...Trying to speak to a culture when you don't know what it's reading, watching, and listening to is like trying to run a church in Mexico without taking the time to learn Spanish. You don't have to know all the details of every little thing, but if you don't at least have basic familiarity with the surrounding culture, you will end up teaching people that God only fits some official box remote from their actual lives."